More Transparent Public Records
Happy Monday!
Today we are jumping into a conversation about public records.
Let me set it up for you all.
A couple of weeks ago, I did a records request for emails for Kevin Cunningham, our realtor for Betz Farm, who had a contract with Citrus County. Per his contract, he was required to maintain emails and other documents he created/received as public record and subject to inspection upon request.
I made a request for emails regarding Betz Farm. I received a total of 12 emails when it was fulfilled by the county. This request was for emails that were sent to and received from James Dicks and/or his representatives.
Ok, seems odd. I would think as the county's representative in a land deal for Betz Farm, that he would have more than 12 total emails over the 2+ years Dicks has had the contract.
I did a 2nd request to the county for emails on the county system that were sent to and received from Kevin Cunningham. This turned up around 190 or so emails. As I began to look through those, I found an email that included a Google Drive link that was sent to the records custodian in the county.
This Google Drive link included over 100 emails that were sent by Cunningham to the county to fulfill the records request I asked for regarding Dicks. I quickly browsed through those and noticed a bunch of emails that were not included in the original batch...
I emailed the county's records custodian back and told him that I found emails that were not included in the original request and asked why they were not included despite having been sent by Cunningham. He responded that he would review my findings and then replied back that the folder was updated with all the additional emails that apply to that request.
There are now 134 files included... far more than the original 12 that he said were the result of the request.
At the end of the day, I received the emails I had requested, but had I not done a follow up request, I would never have seen them. For whatever reason, they were never included in my original request.
That cannot happen. No one should need to do a follow up request separately to get responsive records.
However, I do not blame the person who fulfilled the records request. I blame the system. The person doing it is a human. I get they make mistakes. We all do. This is a difficult task. I see the number of records requests this county receives.
As of May 29, 2026, the county had received 673 records requests for the year. 149 days... 673 records requests... 4.5 requests per day.
That is a lot of work and there are bound to be mistakes here and there. Apparently, the person(s) who do this have to go through each email/document/text/etc by hand to review them for exempt information.
That is INSANE.
But these mistakes can be costly should someone litigate it as a violation of public records laws for not providing the requested records. This is setting the county up for some issues down the road.
I have a solution.
Why can we not go to what Alachua County does and make ALL emails searchable, at least the commissioner emails?
All the emails exist on a server anyway. Not sure how the IT works, but I cannot imagine it would be that difficult to provide a way for the public to review all the emails on the server (without compromising the server security of course). Find out what Alachua does and do that.
This would eliminate the need for a records custodian to take time to provide access to those emails. Just about every email is considered public record anyway... why not just give the public access?
There should be a way to remove exempt information, like social security numbers, bank accounts, attorney client issues, etc... but most government emails say in the footer that everything in that email is public record and to not send those things.
If there is something sensitive sent through email, tag is as sensitive and the server can exclude that and allow the records custodian to determine if that is actually an exempt email or not.
We need to make this easier and it appears that Alachua may have the best system in place to do that. If it is all about transparency, let's make it super easy for everyone to see what takes place in email!